Just days after we reported that trilateral peace negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, and the Trump administration had been suspended –  likely indefinitely – thanks to Washington’s escalating involvement in the Iran war, Reuters is now confirming the inevitable: Moscow is pressing ahead with a fresh springtime offensive while Kiev scrambles to hold the line.

As we reported before, from the collapse of talks in Geneva and Miami to Putin’s envoy shuttling back for what turned out to be fruitless charades, the Iran war has not only sucked up U.S. attention and air-defense munitions Ukraine desperately needs, but has also juiced Russian oil revenues at the worst possible moment for Kremlin planners. 

According to the latest from Kiev, Ukraine’s strategy now boils down to “building on recent tactical successes and battlefield innovations like mid-range strikes” to blunt the assault on the so-called Fortress Belt, the heavily fortified cluster of cities in Donetsk including Sloviansk (northern anchor), Pokrovsk, and Kostiantynivka. Russia, fresh off capturing nearly all of the key logistics hub at Pokrovsk this winter, has already launched a battalion-sized push northeast of Sloviansk and smaller probing attacks around the southern end of the belt. The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Finnish analysts at Black Bird Group are calling it exactly what it is: Moscow creating conditions for a broader offensive now that the ground has thawed.

Sloviansk authorities just ordered the compulsory evacuation of children as Russian forces sit a mere 20 km away — a grim sign the “deteriorating security situation” is no longer hypothetical. Russian General Staff chief Valery Gerasimov boasted last week that the offensive is “underway in all directions,” explicitly naming Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, and Kostiantynivka as targets. Over the past four days alone, Ukrainian General Staff data shows Russia conducted more than 600 assaults across the front, with the heaviest concentration (163) near Pokrovsk.

This is precisely the momentum we highlighted in our March 17 piece, “Russia Touts Capture Of A Dozen Ukrainian Settlements In Opening Weeks Of March,” where Gerasimov himself confirmed 12 settlements “liberated” in just two weeks, with street fighting already deep inside Kostiantynivka.

Ukraine’s Counter-Narrative: Drones, Starlink Sabotage, And “Metrics”

Kyiv isn’t exactly waving the white flag. Officials point to modest territorial gains last month – around 400 sq km in Zaporizhzhia, the first net positive since summer 2024 – aided in no small part by Elon Musk’s crackdown on Russian Starlink usage, which reportedly scrambled Moscow’s comms. Ukraine’s new Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov (the former digital guru) is pushing a “technology-driven, metrics-focused” plan, claiming Ukrainian forces are now eliminating more Russian troops than Moscow can recruit.

New recruits of the 65th Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces attend a military training near a frontline, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine March 21, 2026.

Analysts like Rob Lee at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Vladyslav Urubkov of the Come Back Alive charity acknowledge Russia’s manpower edge but argue improved Ukrainian drone integration and tactical assaults could cap Moscow’s gains at a few hundred square kilometers per month. ISW, for its part, expects “some tactical gains” around the Fortress Belt in 2026, but no major breakthrough.

The Real Story: Manpower, Money, And Distraction

Reality check: Ukraine is still bleeding manpower, struggling to recruit enough bodies for the meat grinder, while its finances teeter after Hungary vetoed a €90 billion EU loan package this month. Russia, meanwhile, watches oil prices soar courtesy of the Iran war, boosting export revenues (earlier we reported that India purchased 60 million barrels of Russian oil courtesy of the recent unsanctioning by the Trump admin). And those U.S. air-defense stocks Ukraine relies on? Now being diverted to the Middle East theater.

President Zelensky himself admitted on Sunday that Russia is exploiting warmer weather to intensify operations, a far cry from the “we’re winning” rhetoric that dominated Western media for years. Commanders on the ground describe the expected Russian playbook: multi-axis pressure to rupture Ukrainian formations at weak points, with armored pushes (now rarer thanks to drone dominance) signaling Moscow’s desire to accelerate.

The “Peace” Theater Was Always a Sideshow

Recall our coverage of the endless cycle: Zelensky exploding under U.S. pressure in February (“no time for unsuccessful decisions”), Putin reportedly floating intel-sharing swaps tied to Ukraine aid, and European meddling that only prolonged the agony while Russian forces kept grinding forward.

The Iran conflict didn’t just pause talks — it exposed the whole farce. Washington can’t mediate while fighting on another front, Europe can’t deliver the cash, and Kyiv can’t hold the line forever against a Russia that has already captured thousands of square kilometers since 2025.

The grinding war of attrition continues. Fortress Belt under assault. Peace talks? Suspended, likely indefinitely, especially with the world’s attention glued to that “other”, far bigger war.

The world’s biggest energy execs are currently at the annual CERAWeek conclave in Houston where, understandably, they are dropping bulletin bombs reeking of fire and brimstone, and warning the already critical oil/gas situation will only get worse if the pre-war status quo isn’t restored (which incidentally will be great for their bottom lines… until the world is tipped into a recession).

Take US oil giant Chevron, which warned that California is careening toward an energy crisis because of the Iran war (which will likely be resolved soon), and that the company may quit refining oil in the state unless officials roll back taxes and regulations (which is unlikely to ever be resolved as long as Dems are in charge of the Golden State).

California is highly exposed to the disruption rippling across commodity markets because it imports about 20% of its refined fuels from Asia. But as extensively discussed here, oil product shipments from China, South Korea, Singapore and elsewhere are at risk of slowing significantly as Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, leaving Asian nations struggling to meet their own demand at home let alone export to California.

Chevron’s oil refining head Andy Walz said the potential for fuel shortages in California is his worst fear: “We have refineries in Asia that are having to cut crude, and so they’re going to make less products,” Walz said in an interview Tuesday. “What if San Francisco doesn’t have the jet fuel it needs? Or Los Angeles? Or maybe gasoline?”

And as if to confirm his warning, just hours later the price of California Diesel hit a record high just above $7 per gallon, or $7.072 to be precise. 

That topped the previous record of $7.012 in June 2022, in the first months of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Source: AAA

Since California is disconnected from the US fuel-making centers of Texas and Louisiana, it is essentially an energy island. That’s compounded by multiple refinery closures in recent years due to increased costs driven by regulations designed to fight climate change and cap oil industry profits, not to mention the state’s toxic and oppressive regulatory regime. 

As a result, California consumers are more exposed than most other Americans to surging energy prices because of the Iran war. They already pay nearly $6 for a gallon of gasoline, compared with a national average of close to $4, due to the state’s ruinous legacy “green” regime. It’s a growing political problem for Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who is expected to run for president in 2028.

“California has decided that they’re going to rely on imports,” Walz said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston. “It’s a dangerous game”, Walz added tongue-in-cheek.

California officials should declare an “energy emergency,” reform its climate and tax rules and promote in-state oil production, Walz said. Without such action, Chevron could quit refining in California within a decade, he said.

A spokesman for California Governor Newsom’s office said oil companies are “cashing in” on the war in Iran and running a “coordinated campaign” to attack California. In other words nothing will change until prices get to be so high, the state’s residents demand change.

“If they’re serious about protecting consumers, they should direct that concern where it belongs: at Donald Trump. There’s no end in sight to Trump’s war taxing American families at the pump,” the spokesman, Anthony Martinez, said in an email, confirming Newsom’s plan is… to pretend there is no problem.

Meanwhile, anyone with a brain can see what’s coming: the problem in California is one of the state’s own making, Walz said.

The Trump administration has already used emergency wartime powers to authorize Sable Offshore, a Houston-based driller, to restart oil production off the California coast. The president has also temporarily waived a century-old maritime law called the Jones Act to help make it cheaper and easier to ship gasoline, diesel and other commodities between US ports.

Meanwhile, California already has the nation’s toughest fuel standards as well as a carbon cap-and-trade program that critics say forces consumers to pay the highest prices in the nation. Its goal to reduce carbon emissions 85% by 2045 relies heavily on a near-complete phaseout of gasoline-powered cars and a large reduction in heavy industry — including refining. 

Nonetheless, California remains the country’s second-largest consumer of gasoline and the largest market for jet fuel, for which there’s currently no practical low-carbon alternative. The Democratic state’s recent revulsion toward Elon Musk, and Tesla, has not helped the looming fuel crisis. 

“The California intent to offshore carbon to other nations has offshored their security of supply,” Walz said. “They’ve offshored jobs and they haven’t had any impact on carbon.” 

Chevron, which has tankers sitting idle on each side of the Strait of Hormuz, is taking the unusual step of shipping Gulf Coast oil to California through the Panama Canal as the war disrupts shipments from the region that West Coast refiners typically use, Walz said. 

China has already imposed a fuel export ban as shipments from the Gulf dwindle. If the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked long enough, other Asian countries could follow suit. Chevron’s scenario planning initially looked at the Strait being closed until the end of March.

“Now our scenario plans are worse,” Walz said. “It’s going to be longer and we’re trying to look around the corner.”

California is home to more than 30 military bases. That includes one of the largest in the US, Travis Air Force Base, which Chevron supplies from its Richmond refinery.

“I think the US government should be concerned,” Walz said.

But wait, there’s more because the state’s green lunatics threaten to make an already dire crisis something truly historic: new emissions rules proposed by the California Air Resources Board, if implemented, threaten to drive costs for the state’s remaining refineries even higher. Chevron estimates the additional expenses could hit $500 million within five years.

“They need to abandon the tax on refineries or they won’t have any refineries in 10 years,” Walz said. “If it stays that way — Chevron will be gone in 10 years for sure. We won’t be able to make it.”

* * *

But it’s not just California that faces a historic crisis: Europe is about to get crushed as well. 

According to Shell CEO Wael Sawan, Europe will soon begin to experience the same kind of disruption to fuel supplies that Asia has faced due to the war in Iran in recent weeks. Sawan said the effects of the conflict continue to ripple out across global fuel markets, first in South Asia, then Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, and increasingly in Europe as April approaches.

“We are trying to work with governments to just alert them to the various levers they will need to pull, including on the demand side, including what they need to do around storage,” he said Tuesday at the same CERAWeek conference. 

Just like California, expect Europe to do nothing besides pointing fingers, until it is too late. 

With stocks closing solidly in the green despite some painful wobbles during the day, one sector was a notable laggard: the same sector that had dramatically outperformed the S&P since memory prices soared last October: memory stocks, most notably MU and SNDK.

In his EOD wrap, Goldman tech specialist Peter Callahan wrote that while there wasn’t that much actual “angst” out there, his clients complained of plenty of “sanity checking” on the sharp downward moves in memory stocks (MU / SNDK lower vs. OEMs higher) and especially “the 5 day slide in MU as Micron has underperformed the SOX by 20% in 5-days, starting with the company’s blowout earnings report; that move ranks as the largest 5 days of underperformance relative to Semis/SOX since 2011.

What caused today’s remarkable slump, which at one point saw Micron shares fall over 6% and Sandisk sliding 9% before paring losses, with other notable decliners including Western Digital (-6.7%) and Seagate Technologies (-8.5%)?

The answer was the latest announcement from Google Research, which after the close on Wednesday unveiled TurboQuant, a compression algorithm for large language models and vector search engines, that shrinks a major inference-memory bottleneck: it reduces an AI model’s memory 6x, making it 8x faster with the same number of GPUs, all the while maintaining zero loss in accuracy and “redefining AI efficiency.”

Introducing TurboQuant: Our new compression algorithm that reduces LLM key-value cache memory by at least 6x and delivers up to 8x speedup, all with zero accuracy loss, redefining AI efficiency. Read the blog to learn how it achieves these results: https://t.co/CDSQ8HpZoc pic.twitter.com/9SJeMqCMlN

— Google Research (@GoogleResearch) March 24, 2026

The paper is slated for presentation at ICLR 2026, but the reaction online was immediate: Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince called it “Google’s DeepSeek moment.“

To be sure, the announcement from @GoogleResearch generated massive engagement, with over 7.7 million views, signaling that the industry was hungry for a solution to the memory crisis.  Everyone – except for the memory producers – was ecstatic.

Within 24 hours of the release, community members began porting the algorithm to popular local AI libraries like MLX for Apple Silicon and llama.cpp.

Technical analyst @Prince_Canuma shared one of the most compelling early benchmarks, implementing TurboQuant in MLX to test the Qwen3.5-35B model. 

Across context lengths ranging from 8.5K to 64K tokens, he reported a 100% exact match at every quantization level, noting that 2.5-bit TurboQuant reduced the KV cache by nearly 5x with zero accuracy loss. This real-world validation echoed Google’s internal research, proving that the algorithm’s benefits translate seamlessly to third-party models.

Just implemented Google’s TurboQuant in MLX and the results are wild!

Needle-in-a-haystack using Qwen3.5-35B-A3B across 8.5K, 32.7K, and 64.2K context lengths:

→ 6/6 exact match at every quant level
→ TurboQuant 2.5-bit: 4.9x smaller KV cache
→ TurboQuant 3.5-bit: 3.8x… https://t.co/aLxRJIhB1D pic.twitter.com/drVrkL7Pw4

— Prince Canuma (@Prince_Canuma) March 25, 2026

Other users focused on the democratization of high-performance AI. @NoahEpstein_ provided a plain-English breakdown, arguing that TurboQuant significantly narrows the gap between free local AI and expensive cloud subscriptions. 

He noted that models running locally on consumer hardware like a Mac Mini “just got dramatically better,” enabling 100,000-token conversations without the typical quality degradation. 

Similarly, @PrajwalTomar_ highlighted the security and speed benefits of running “insane AI models locally for free,” expressing “huge respect” for Google’s decision to share the research rather than keeping it proprietary.

The implication is clear: if Google can achieve the same inference results with one-sixth of the hardware, then demand for memory chips will collapse in inverse proportion – the same ravenous demand that until recently sent DDR prices as much as 7x higher in just 3 months when the memory bottleneck for AI became apparent…

… and more recently sent inference-heavy NAND Flash prices also surging.

If this sounds similar to the infamous Pied Piper algorithm from Silicon Valley, it’s because it is, all minus the jerking off part :

Prominent cryptocurrency analyst Kaleo captured the sentiment perfectly, tweeting: “So Google TurboQuant is basically Pied Piper and just hit a Weismann Score of 5.2.” This reference to the fictional show’s compression metric demonstrates how deeply the cultural comparison has resonated. Technology commentator Justin Trimble echoed this perspective, simply stating: “TurboQuant is the new Pied Piper.”

Of course, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but the premise is there: taking existing hardware and achieving a far better compression result.

A quick technical side note on how Turboquant achieves this remarkable improvement in efficiency per decrypt:

Quantization efficiency is a big achievement by itself. But “zero accuracy loss” needs context. TurboQuant targets the KV cache—the chunk of GPU memory that stores everything a language model needs to remember during a conversation.

As context windows grow toward millions of tokens, those caches balloon into hundreds of gigabytes per session. That’s the actual bottleneck. Not compute power but raw memory.

Traditional compression methods try to shrink those caches by rounding numbers down—from 32-bit floats to 16, to 8 to 4-bit integers, for example. To better understand it, think of shrinking an image from 4K, to full HD, to 720p and so. It’s easy to tell it’s the same image overall, but there’s more detail in 4K resolution.

The catch: they have to store extra “quantization constants” alongside the compressed data to keep the model from going stupid. Those constants add 1 to 2 bits per value, partially eroding the gains.

TurboQuant claims it eliminates that overhead entirely.

It does this via two sub-algorithms. PolarQuant separates magnitude from direction in vectors, and QJL (Quantized Johnson-Lindenstrauss) takes the tiny residual error left over and reduces it to a single sign bit, positive or negative, with zero stored constants.

The result, Google says, is a mathematically unbiased estimator for the attention calculations that drive transformer models.

In benchmarks using Gemma and Mistral, TurboQuant matched full-precision performance under 4x compression, including perfect retrieval accuracy on needle-in-haystack tasks up to 104,000 tokens.

For context on why those benchmarks matter, expanding a model’s usable context without quality loss has been one of the hardest problems in LLM deployment.

Now, the fine print. “Zero accuracy loss” applies to KV cache compression during inference—not to the model’s weights. Compressing weights is a completely different, harder problem. TurboQuant doesn’t touch those.

What it compresses is the temporary memory storing mid-session attention computations, which is more forgiving because that data can theoretically be reconstructed.

There’s also the gap between a clean benchmark and a production system serving billions of requests. TurboQuant was tested on open-source models—Gemma, Mistral, Llama—not Google’s own Gemini stack at scale.

The punchline: unlike DeepSeek’s efficiency gains, which required deep architectural decisions baked in from the start, TurboQuant requires no retraining or fine-tuning and claims negligible runtime overhead. In theory, it drops straight into existing inference pipelines.

That’s the part that spooked the memory hardware sector – because if it works in production, every major AI lab will run much leaner on the same GPUs they already own. Or said, in terms of P&L, AI companies – already deeply cash flow negative – and which are suddenly bleeding even more profit margin (which they don’t have but assume they did) to soaring RAM prices, have found a software way to require far less hardware – potentially as much as 6x less – and thus flip the table on the memory makers who are generating massive profits precisely because they refuse to produce more memory in what some would call cartel-like behavior. In doing so, they may have eliminated the entire physical memory bottleneck, courtesy of the memory cartel which magically can’t find any new supply until 2027 or later.

But wait, it gets better: because if Google has already found a compression algo that achieves such phenomenal efficiency improvements, it is virtually certain that further optimization – and competing algos – will surely lead to far greater efficiency, reducing the amount of hardware needed even further. 

And just like that, suddenly the memory bubble which was built on the assumption that demand for DRAM and NAND will persist will into the future, looks set to burst as software may have just solved a very sticky hardware problem.

Indeed today’s plunge in stocks may have been just the first step.  The market’s reaction reflects a realization that if AI giants can compress their memory requirements by a factor of six through software alone, the insatiable demand for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) may be tempered by algorithmic efficiency.

As we move deeper into 2026, the arrival of TurboQuant suggests that the next era of AI progress will be defined as much by mathematical elegance as by brute force. By redefining efficiency through extreme compression, Google is enabling “smarter memory movement” for multi-step agents and dense retrieval pipelines. The industry is shifting from a focus on “bigger models” to “better memory,” a change that could lower AI serving costs globally.

Ultimately, TurboQuant proves that the limit of AI isn’t just how many transistors we can cram onto a chip, but how elegantly we can translate the infinite complexity of information into the finite space of a digital bit. For the enterprise, this is more than just a research paper; it is a tactical unlock that turns existing hardware into a significantly more powerful asset.

The Google paper goes to ICLR 2026. Until it ships in production, the “zero loss” headline stays in the lab, but the market isn’t waiting and the mere threat that demand for memory may tumble by orders of magnitude could shock the entire ecosystem. In which case, buy puts on the Kospi, which is about 100% overvalued if the “memory benefit” of its two core stocks, Samsung and SK Hynix, disappears. Come to think of it, short everything memory. 

For more, please see “Google’s new TurboQuant algorithm speeds up AI memory 8x, cutting costs by 50% or more“

Lawyers for Elon Musk and Tesla are seeking to have a Delaware judge removed from cases involving them, arguing her neutrality could be questioned after her LinkedIn account “liked” a post about Musk losing a recent trial in California, according to Financial Times.

Musk’s firm said the interaction with the “inflammatory” post created “a perception of bias against Mr. Musk in these cases, recusal is necessary and warranted”. The post referred to a federal case where a jury concluded Musk had defrauded Twitter investors, a decision that could cost him billions if it stands. A consultant who worked with the plaintiffs even took a jab at Musk and his legal team in that same thread.

Judge Kathaleen McCormick responded that she didn’t realize the post had been liked until LinkedIn alerted her.

She stated: “I either did not click the ‘support’ icon at all, or I did so accidentally. I do not believe that I did it accidentally,” suggesting uncertainty about how it happened.

FT writes that the situation is another chapter in Musk’s strained relationship with Delaware’s courts.

McCormick has previously ruled against him, including decisions to void Tesla’s massive $56bn compensation package—though it was later reinstated on appeal despite agreement with some of her criticisms.

Musk has long expressed distrust of the state’s judiciary, even relocating Tesla’s incorporation to Texas. During a prior dispute with Twitter, he told jurors: “We were unlikely to win the case in Delaware because the judge [McCormick] was extremely biased against me.”

McCormick still oversees a separate Tesla-related case tied to shareholder claims about excessive director pay. She said she will consider stepping aside and also noted that she lost access to her LinkedIn account after the incident.

The controversy reflects wider concerns about judges’ activity on social media. In 2025, another Delaware judge stepped away from LinkedIn after facing backlash over his posts.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Mortgage rates on a 30-year loan just hit 7 percent, intensifying problems on the demand side. Mortgages plus insurance—which turns a half-million dollar house into a $1.2 million house plus property taxes—became unaffordable for another class of buyers while already out of reach for most people.

On the supply side, millions of existing homeowners are locked into COVID-era mortgages of 3 percent or lower, which makes them negative in real terms. That’s a great deal unless you sell and then have to buy again. It would make no sense to sell in any case, but you are still stuck paying ever higher property taxes on ever higher valuations.

This has produced a problem that is evident in January’s new home sales numbers, which fell 18 percent, the largest drop in 13 years and a level comparable to the bust following the 2008 financial crisis that began with housing. What’s happening in real time is suggested by the anecdotes. People are neither selling nor buying—unless of course you have a full load of cash on hand.

The picture this creates is one of illusory wealth, on one hand, and frustrated renters on the other. The existing owners are paying ever higher property taxes on rising home valuations but their own joy comes from looking at their paper wealth rise on Zillow. It’s an unrealized gain, and realizing it is contingent on willing and lucrative buyers.

Otherwise, they are stuck. Closing a sale at the market price is wonderful but parlaying that into new living conditions would certainly land you in a smaller home or a different market entirely, requiring a geographic relocation. A fixer upper is not really viable either when it seems nearly impossible to find affordable and competent service providers these days plus the high cost of all resources.

This is again more collateral damage from lockdowns and zero interest rates. The people who used stimulus payments for home purchases thought they were getting a great deal. In some ways they were, but this is mitigated by rising property taxes and the feeling of being stuck in a homeowner situation from which there is no financially rational escape.

The buying peak of 2020 is matched by the selling trough of 2026 almost as mirror images.

The housing market is distinct for being spottily illiquid. This doesn’t happen in the market for eggs, jeans, or beef. A frozen market is about plentiful supply but few willing sellers or buyers. Posted prices become illusory because they are not manifested in actual trade. They are only estimates of trades, like a high-priced product on eBay that no one buys.

People are worried about a repeat of 2008 with a housing crash. That’s not out of the question, but the circumstances are different. If real buyers are scarce, and sellers are locked into their favorable contracts, the downward pressure on prices is thereby reduced. Rents are falling today but home prices, not so much. A locked market is different from a crashing one.

It’s hard to see the way out of this one absent a huge increase in supply and a drop in mortgage rates, neither of which seems likely any time soon. Indeed, Trump has reversed his campaign pledge of more housing stocks on grounds that he doesn’t want to reduce property values for existing homeowners, most of whom are the Boomer generation.

This topic is particularly sensitive in American culture. This is because the United States was the first country really to achieve the ideal of widespread and affordable homeownership for the middle class. This began after World War II with thanks in part to tax deductions for mortgage interest and other forms of subsidies. The goal was to construct the American dream. It worked.

The last five years have offered a fundamental challenge to that ideal, as young people are in no position to afford a house. The median age of first-time home buyers from 1950 to the 1990s was 24–28 years old. After 2008, that began to creep up. Today, the age of new home buyers is 40 years and older. Those numbers represent the shattering of an important part of the American dream.

The hope of the Trump administration was to find ways to revive the old dream through lower mortgage rates and other financial benefits to first-time buyers. But in fact, the problem is too entrenched and too deep to be fixed with small policy changes. Plus, since the war on Iran, bond markets have been profoundly disturbed. The yield curve is steepening in ways that have rattled market observers.

That is a conspicuous gap between a promised policy and actual results. It further illustrates just how little control government has over a price spread that is ruled by market forces rather than agency officials or elected leaders. Nor would buyer subsidies work: those are quickly factored into market demand and reflected in higher prices.

Average down payments have shifted upwards too. While the percentage down payment has often been lower today than it was in the 1960s, the real dollar amount has increased as much as four times. This is because homes are much more expensive in inflation-adjusted terms. Saving for a down payment now takes significantly longer relative to income for many households than it did in 1960.

Young people, even those fortunate enough to find high-paying jobs, are priced out of the market for as long as 15 years of their working lives. If they are fortunate to have access to family money, a cash purchase remains the best option by far, even with the deduction for rising interest rates.

This is a significant feature of the demoralization and anger that voters under the age of 35 feel today, along with growing job insecurity, rising medical insurance costs (sometimes even higher than rents), and persistent and rising inflation. I would strongly recommend that all talk of a Golden Age be put on hold until these serious problems begin to resolve themselves. That won’t be anytime soon.

Earlier this week, Jose Medina-Medina, an illegal immigrant whom the Biden administration caught and released at the border, murdered Loyola University freshman Sheridan Gorman. Medina-Medina had previously been arrested at least twice in Chicago, yet was released by local authorities, thanks to their sanctuary policies. According to reports, he approached her, raised a gun, and opened fire as she tried to flee. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

The Democratic Party’s response has been nothing short of horrific. 

Chicago Alderwoman Maria Hadden, a Democrat, essentially blamed Gorman for her own murder.

“From what police know, from — from speaking to the students who were with her, it seems she [Sheridan Gorman] might have …they were just out, you know, people go out to the beach all the time, right?” She said in a now-viral video.

“And they go out on the pier, they walk around so that the kids were out doing normal, normal things people do in the neighborhood, and it sounds like this might have been a wrong place, wrong time, running into a person who had a gun. They might have startled this person at the end of the pier unintentionally. But that’s all we know.”

Meet Chicago Democrat and 49th Ward Alderwoman Maria Hadden, who pretty much blamed Sheridan Gorman for her own murder:

“The kids were out doing normal things people do in the neighborhood. And it sounds like this might have been a wrong-place, wrong-time situation, running into… pic.twitter.com/QkJnRGqIaG

— Gina Milan (@ginamilan_) March 23, 2026

Gov. JB Pritzker attacked the Trump administration for politicizing Gorman’s death.

“The Trump Administration needs to stop politicizing heinous tragedies and instead focus on real solutions, like reinstating federal funds to prevent violence that support our public safety efforts,” he said in a statement.

Fox News reported Tuesday that nearly a dozen Illinois Democrats are refusing to defend their votes against the Laken Riley Act in the wake of Gorman’s murder.

Illinois’ delegation split 11–5 against the Laken Riley Act. All three Republicans, plus Democrats Nikki Budzinski and Eric Sorenson, backed the bill, while 11 Democrats opposed it. Rep. Brad Schneider missed the vote due to a medical emergency but said he would have voted no, insisting that the Laken Riley Act was exploiting her death to “score cheap political points.”

The Trump administration believes Gorman’s death was completely preventable.

“Sheridan Gorman — just like Laken Riley and countless other American victims — would still be with us today and with their families if it were not for sanctuary politicians’ refusal to cooperate with ICE,” DHS Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis told Fox News Digital.

The reaction from Democrats to Gorman’s death has been so despicable that Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) unloaded on his own party over it.

“Why can’t we just talk about that life lost?” Fetterman told Fox News’s Bill Hemmer. “Why can’t we just acknowledge that this is serious, serious failure?”

Fetterman also invoked the Laken Riley Act, the legislation requiring the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants who commit crimes. Fetterman was one of only a handful of Democrats to vote for it — a fact he’s clearly not going to let his colleagues forget.

“I think only seven or eight Democrats even voted for [the] Laken Riley [Act],” he said. “Why can’t you just agree that if you’re breaking the law and you’re already here illegally, deport them? I just don’t understand.”

He continued, “Tragedies like what happened to that young woman, they are gonna continue to happen,” he said. “That’s beyond common sense.”

Hemmer pressed him on why Democrats can’t seem to get there, and Fetterman gave an honest, if uncomfortable, answer.

“I guess they’re afraid of the base,” he replied.

Fetterman acknowledged that his positions put him in a tough spot inside his own party. He said he’s been “constantly punished” for breaking ranks — on the government shutdown vote, on his views about Iran, and now this. He doesn’t seem particularly bothered. “I’d rather be on the moral clarity or on the right side of history, or the correct kinds of principles,” he said. “That puts me at odds with parts of my party.”

🚨NEW: John Fetterman on Sheridan Gorman🇺🇸

“Why can’t we just talk about that life lost? Why can’t we just acknowledge that this is a SERIOUS FAILURE? It’s DEVASTATING as a father.”

“We have to protect America from the DANGEROUS elements that shouldn’t even be here.” pic.twitter.com/9SQnSbXC8d

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) March 24, 2026

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal judge on March 24 seemed receptive to Anthropic’s request to temporarily block the Department of War from continuing to designate the AI company as a supply-chain risk.

The designation, under a federal law designed to protect military systems from foreign sabotage, functions as a blacklist, preventing the company from doing business with the federal government and its contractors.

If the block is granted, the company would be able to continue doing business with federal agencies and their contractors while the lawsuit moves forward in court.

The AI developer sued the department in the federal court’s Northern California district on March 9, after the federal government issued the designation, citing its national security concerns about the company. Anthropic also filed a separate lawsuit the same day over the designation in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

President Donald Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth previously announced a federal boycott of Anthropic, directing federal agencies, contractors, and suppliers to end ties to the company.

On social media, Trump said Anthropic was attempting to “strong-arm” the federal government and officials elected by the American people by dictating its military policy.

“WE will decide the fate of our Country—NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about,” Trump said in a Feb. 27 Truth Social post.

The lawsuits came after Anthropic said it declined to change the user policy for its AI product, Claude, to remove safety guardrails preventing its use for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

The Department of War has said that it has no intent to use Claude for those purposes.

The department said on March 5 that the issue comes down to ensuring the military can use technology for “all lawful purposes.”

“The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command by restricting the lawful use of a critical capability and put our warfighters at risk,” the Pentagon said in a statement provided to multiple news outlets.

Anthropic’s technology is embedded in classified military platforms, including those that are already in use in current U.S. operations against the Islamic Republic of Iran in Operation Epic Fury.

The company alleged that the supply-chain risk designation constitutes unlawful retaliation and that it could lose billions of dollars if the federal boycott of its products continues. The designation requires that defense contractors certify that they are not using Claude when working with the department.

At a preliminary injunction hearing in San Francisco on March 24, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin (D) said the department’s actions against the company were “troubling” because they did not seem “tailored to the stated national security concerns,” and looked like “an attempt to cripple Anthropic.”

If the department were worried “about the integrity of the operational chain of command, [it] could just stop using Claude,” without banning Anthropic “from ever having another government contract,” she said.

She said the supply-chain risk designation applies to “adversaries of the U.S. government who may sabotage its technology systems.” Such designations typically apply to foreign intelligence, terrorists, and other hostile actors, the judge said.

Lin expressed concern that the government might be trying to punish Anthropic for “criticizing the government’s contracting position in the press,” adding that such punishment would violate the Constitution’s First Amendment.

Also at the hearing, Anthropic’s attorney, Mike Mongan, said the designation was the first time a U.S. company has been designated as a supply-chain risk.

“Everything we stand accused of in this proceeding is entirely above board,” Mongan said, adding the company has sincere concerns about the “profound implications” of using its AI tools for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General Eric Hamilton said that the government’s national security concerns outweighed any alleged violations of Anthropic’s rights.

Given the company’s concerns about how the government will use its technology, the Department of War is worried that Anthropic may sabotage or subvert systems, possibly through technology updates, Hamilton said.

Mongan said the government has not identified any legal authority for the federal boycott of Anthropic. He urged the court to grant a preliminary injunction against the supply-chain risk designation, arguing the company was likely to succeed at trial on First Amendment and other grounds.

Hamilton told the court it should deny the injunction.

Failing to do so could allow a technology company to “gain leverage over the Department of War and decide which missions it can conduct,” the government lawyer said.

Anthropic asked Lin to rule on the company’s motion to stay the designation by March 26, but she is not required to meet that suggested deadline.

“I anticipate issuing an order in the next few days,” the judge said as she concluded the hearing.

Stacy Robinson, Aldgra Fredly, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

During a recent podcast with Theo Von, Actor Vince Vaughn calls out late-night comedians, says people like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and others have all become the “SAME SHOW.”

Via @VigilantFox:

THEO VON: “A lot of the late shows have struggled.”

VINCE VAUGHN: “Oh, bro.”

THEO: “Because… the only person they could make fun of at a certain point was just like white redneck kind of people. And it f*cking tanked [ratings].”

VINCE: “I think that the talk shows, to a large part, became really agenda-based.”

“They were gonna evangelize people to what they thought… It felt like they had an agenda.”

“It stopped being funny, and it started feeling like I was in a f*cking class I didn’t want to take.”

“They all became the same show.”

“And they all became so about their politics and who’s good and who’s bad.”

“Imagine sitting next to someone like that on a f*cking plane. You’d be like, how do I get out of this f*cking seat?”

THEO: “I would FART right next to them.”

VINCE: “You’d fart your way out of it?”

THEO: “Yeah, I would. I would for sure.”

*  *  *

Watch the clip here (via @VigilantFox)

Actor Vince Vaughn calls out late-night comedians, says people like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and others have all become the “SAME SHOW.”

“It stopped being funny, and it started feeling like I was in a f*cking class I didn’t want to take.”

THEO VON: “A lot of the late… pic.twitter.com/9gTyBfdWtc

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) March 24, 2026

* * * THIS IS THE BIG BOY KIT – 3 MONTHS OF FOOD

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Dr. Robert Malone said on March 25 that he will no longer advise health officials on vaccines.

“I’m done,” Malone told The Epoch Times.

Malone was vice chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on immunizations.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. selected Malone and other new ACIP members in 2025, after removing the previous slate.

A federal judge recently ruled that Kennedy did not follow proper procedure in appointing the members and stayed the appointments. The judge also blocked changes to the CDC vaccine schedule, some of which were prompted by votes from the remade ACIP.

Malone, a former EpochTV host and an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University, has panned the decision, noting that the judge deemed him unfit even though he has decades of experience in the vaccine field.

Malone said Wednesday that he had already been trying to figure out how to leave ACIP “in some sort of a graceful, professional way for months now,” in part because of criticism from health care groups over matters such as the ACIP vote to recommend the CDC narrow guidance for messenger ribonucleic acid and other vaccines against COVID-19.

He is also focusing on working with the State Department on biological warfare agreements.

Malone said that members, who do not receive compensation, have not been treated well by the Trump administration, pointing to how Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesman Andrew Nixon responded after Malone publicized how officials allegedly told members they would be reconstituting ACIP rather than appeal the judge’s ruling.

“I’m tired of thousands of hours of free labor for just chronic disrespect for all of us,” Malone said.

The Epoch Times has requested a comment from HHS, the CDC’s parent agency, which Kennedy heads.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Washington on Jan. 29, 2026. Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

Nixon pointed to how HHS adviser and former ACIP Chairman Martin Kulldorff told Roll Call, which first reported Malone’s departure, that he found Nixon “professional and honest in all his work supporting ACIP.”

The administration has still not appealed the ruling. Nixon told The Epoch Times in a March 20 email, “Unless officially announced by us, any assertions about what we are doing next is baseless speculation.”

Malone said that Kennedy called him on March 25 to provide an update.

“They’re still making decisions about what they’re going to do, trying to come up with a strategy that they can win on,” Malone said.

“And he gave me an update where that sat, but it would be inappropriate for me to share it.”

Dr. Wafik El-Deiry, director of the Legorretta Cancer Center at Brown University, who worked on an ACIP workgroup on COVID-19 vaccines with Malone, wrote in a post on X that he was sad to learn Malone was departing ACIP.

El-Deiry said in a follow-up post on X that his experience of working with Malone was “seeing only extremely knowledgeable, well-informed, always prepared, spontaneous and up to date, sharp, respectful and appropriately critical input as one would expect on a national advisory panel.”

On Tuesday, diners at a Haidilao hot-pot restaurant in San Jose saw an unexpected disruption when a service robot, apparently part of an in-house performance, malfunctioned and began moving erratically. Instead of entertaining guests, it knocked dishes to the floor and sent chopsticks flying as employees rushed to contain it. Video from the scene shows staff dodging the machine before eventually tackling it; no injuries are apparent, Hoodline wrote.

A malfunctioning service robot dances uncontrollably at a Haidilao hotpot restaurant in San Jose, California, knocking over tableware as staff members attempt to restrain it, March 2026. pic.twitter.com/6DFCojpeTS

— Future Adam Curtis B-Roll (@adamcurtisbroll) March 17, 2026

A short clip shared online captures the robot, dressed in an orange apron, flailing through the dining area and upsetting tableware. At one point, a worker appears to grab it near the neck while looking at a phone, seemingly trying to access controls as the situation unfolds.

The episode comes amid Haidilao’s broader push into automation. The company has spent years integrating technology into its restaurants, including delivery robots and highly automated kitchens. It also introduced a pilot “smart” restaurant in Beijing in 2018 that relied on robotic arms and guided vehicles.

After the footage spread, many online commenters focused on how the robot was shut down. Some pointed out that no obvious emergency stop button was visible and questioned whether clearer manual override systems should be required in restaurants using such machines.

Reports indicate the robot appeared as part of a promotional tie-in for Disney’s “Zootopia 2.” The incident has renewed concerns about how quickly staff can intervene and safely regain control when robotic systems malfunction in crowded public spaces.